Microsoft Shares Hit All-Time High As Company Strengthens Its Cloud Grip (usatoday.com)

Marco della Cava, reporting for USA Today: Microsoft shares surged 5% in early trading Friday, and passed a high set in 1999, helped by enthusiasm for progress in its cloud business. The stock was at up at $60.11, breezing past the $58.72 mark set in December 1999. Friday's rally follows Microsoft's latest quarterly report, out late Thursday, that beat analyst expectations for adjusted sales and profit and showcased a doubling of growth in its Azure cloud business, while reflecting continued strain from consumers' pivot away from PCs and traditional software purchases.Microsoft reported its Q1 2017 earnings yesterday, noting a revenue of $20.5 billion, which was higher than Wall Street's expectations. Company's Intellgent Cloud revenue was up 8 percent, whereas Azure revenue observed 116 percent growth year-on-year.

Comments

Re:this can't be

[ahabswhale]

I hate to break it to you but Amazon still has a huge fucking lead on cloud market share. It's not even close.

Their stock has been split since 1999 right???

[acoustix]

Didn't Microsoft split their stock in the early 2000's? If so, this article doesn't apply.

Can we please get real reporting from real journalists?

Re:this can't be

[JMZero]

..and Amazon will likely retain its lead in supporting large and/or public facing websites.

But there's a lot of businesses, usually non-IT focused ones, who will remain Microsoft shops. For them, hosting their internal, B2B, and smaller public applications on Azure makes a lot of sense, and it's going to be a growth area for MS for a while. Yes you can host your .NET applications lots of places, but all the Azure nonsense is baked into Visual Studio and so, to the extent it basically works, it's going to be the path of least resistance for a lot of people.

In a lot of ways, MS is in a different market than other cloud vendors.

Welcome to the rental economy

[PeeAitchPee]

You can't buy your software anymore, you just rent it. That means you can't just pay once and do whatever you want with that license -- you keep paying, forever (way more than you would have under the old "buy a copy of version x" model) and, being that this software is constantly phoning home to Microsoft, can be changed, cut off, etc. at their whim (as well as more easily hacked / hijacked). Adobe, Intuit, and others of the old desktop software brigade are all moving to this model. It's great for them because of the recurring cash flow, but exactly what is the benefit for the end user besides promised "upgrades"? Do we really need another version of Word (God no -- quit changing it and forcing us to re-learn your shitty interface!)? Did Generally Accepted Accounting Principles change that much that a new major version of QuickBooks is required every year? This should be a huge slam dunk opportunity for the open source desktop software community.

Re:Welcome to the rental economy

[Voyager529]

I concur that the benefits of "upgrades" have been a matter of diminishing returns for quite some time now. Even if there's upgrades and features now, I worry that in five years from now, the real value will be "not losing access to your data".I share your staunch aversion to software subscriptions for that reason.

The problem with relying on the Open Source community to fill the vacuum is that there are lots and lots of factors that are involved. People genuinely do appreciate and benefit from ubiquitous access to their data. That's certainly possible with a whole lot of self-hosted software, but those methods require back end resources, a firewall of consequence, backups, and an internet connection that not only has enough upload bandwidth to support these applications, but an internet connection that doesn't block ports 80 and 443. Here at Slashdot those things aren't a problem, and the Synology NAS units (as well as a few others) help to streamline these through things like QuickConnect, but now we've left OSS solutions.

If we're looking at desktop applications, Quickbooks' greatest asset is the fact that every accounting firm will take a .QBW file, and any Main Street business owner can talk to any other Main Street business owner and probably find out how to do what they need to do. Meanwhile, virtually every OSS accounting package I've looked at has either had a Spartan UI, doesn't do payroll, is gross overkill, or is cloud-only...and all of them are double-entry. The closest I've found from a UI perspective is Xtuple, but its server requirements are insane compared to Quickbooks for a single-machine install. Thus, I submit that the reason why Intuit (whose level of evil in the software world is only eclipsed by Oracle) owns the small business accounting market is because there aren't any single entry OSS financial management applications at all...and with the exception of GNUcash, the only reason why there are the higher end OSS products is because all of their commercial packages have massive price tags attached to them that will rival Intuit's enterprise editions.

On the creative software front, OSS is still very difficult to acclimate to. GIMP can generally do the job in spite of its suboptimal interface, Inkscape is limited but can do the basics well enough, and Scribus is in the uncanny valley between Publisher and InDesign. KDenLive isn't the worst thing ever, but video editing = patent encumbered formats = OSS license hell. Ardour and Audacity can do the job, but they definitely lack the polish of Audition. Honestly, the best competitor to Adobe is Corel, not Github.

There are lots of places where OSS shines (pick just about anywhere in the server closet - you're crazy to run Windows Server as a router, but pfSense, Untangle, Smoothwall, Endian, ClearOS......). There are, however, going to be areas where OSS just will always play second fiddle to commercial software houses. As my very loose rule of thumb, I've found that the further away from programming a discipline is, the worse the OSS software packages are for it.